Wellbeing is now one of the most important drivers of sustainability in offices

As organisations depend more and more on the skills and knowledge of people for their competitive advantage and growth, so too are they increasingly concerned about the wellbeing of individuals. They may not have a magic wand to deal with the issue completely, but they do have more awareness and a growing number of tools …

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How the Dutch pioneered agile working, wellbeing and the world’s smartest buildings

Many of the challenges we face in selecting the right office design models first became apparent during the 1960s as the world adjusted to the first signs of the technological revolution. At the same time, people across Europe were pressing for changes in the way organisations and the economy worked. The advent of formal workers’ …

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Attention to corporate social responsibility higher in family owned firms

Companies owned by families pay more attention to issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR), such as sustainability and environmental issues, according to research from Vlerick Business School in Belgium. Dr. Kerstin Fehre, Professor of Strategy at Vlerick Business School, alongside Dr. Florian Weber from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, studied family firms and …

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Taking an enlightened view of the environmental performance of office furniture

The term ‘greenwash’ has been around for quite a while now. The first recorded use of the term dates back to 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and first entered the Oxford Dictionary in 1999, where it is now enshrined as ‘disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible …

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Why activity based working is an increasingly popular workplace solution

The language we use to describe work and workplaces evolves almost as quickly as the workplace itself. And if there is one term that encapsulates cutting edge workplace design thinking in this part of the 21st Century it is Activity Based Working (ABW). As with most of these ideas there is nothing magical, or even new …

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